The world is shrinking and with it the need to support content for more users means supporting more languages.

Supporting multiple languages on websites is nothing new, but with browser and search engine technology starting to rely on structured data, it has never been more important to make sure you are using the correct markup.

This is where rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” comes in handy.

Simply put, when used correctly, this specification element helps Google index and serve the localized version of your content to users who require an alternate language version.

The best use of this tag is in instances where you have the same or regionally specific content in another language on the same website.

Google recommends use in the following three scenarios:

You have a completely alternate version of your site translated in a different language.

You translate only the navigational components of a page, like the navigation, sidebar, or footer, but the main content remains in only one language. This is commonly used on pages that include user-generated content.

Your pages have very similar content within a single language with regional variations, for example you have Spanish language content targeted at readers in Spain and also South America.

Multilingual vs. Multiregional

Multilingual: A website offering its content in more than one language. An example would include a Canadian business with separate websites on the same domain for both the English and French versions of its content.

Multiregional: Google defines multiregional content as a website that “explicitly targets users in different countries.” This gets a bit difficult to wrap your head around because websites can be both multilingual and multi-regional, for example you could have a soccer (futbol) site with different versions for the USA and for South America, and both Spanish and Portuguese versions of the South American content.

Managing Multilingual Versions of Your Site

The first rule of thumb is to make sure you present your pages so that the default language is clear, both to user’s and search engines. This is best achieved by maintaining a consistent base language throughout your website and declaring the default language in the header markup of each page.

Important note: You should never, ever use automated translation – but if you must due to the nature of your industry or the size of your website, then make sure you use your robots.txt file to block search engines from crawling any auto-translated pages, especially since auto-translated pages can be viewed as spam.

Also, consider the general user experience implications of your URLs. This is something you should always look at closely.

For localized URLs it best to utilize subdirectories whenever possible, and only use subdomains when there is no other option, as subdomains require significantly more configuration including DNS, Ip, etc.

Example of a localized subdirectory:

http://www.example.domain-extension/local-extension/

Example of a localized subdomains:

http://local-extension.example.domain-extension

Also, it’s fine to translate words in the URL to the local language, but make sure to use the UTF-8 encoding in the URL.

Escaping a URL

This is a critical component that really isn’t talked about much in international SEO.

Escaping a URL means to make sure you encode any illegal characters in your URL to their UTF-8 equivalent. This isn’t illegal in the sense that you’re going to get arrested, but more so in terms of proper accepted syntax.

For example, a non-breaking space (or nbsp;) is an illegal character in a URL, so if you tried entering a URL like http://somedomain.com/here-comes-a space, this would be encoded as either http://somedomain.com/Here-Comes-a%20space or http://somedomain.com/Here-Comes-a+space where both %20 and ‘+’ are the UTF-8 supported encodings for the illegal syntax.

Targeting Specific Countries

This is perhaps one of the most overlooked areas of managing multilingual websites.

Google generally uses the following elements to help determine a website’s targeted country:

Server location (through IP address of server). Servers are most likely becoming a decreasingly important signal to search engines as more websites are beginning to move to distributed hosting solutions like virtual servers and cloud-based networks.

Top-Level Domains. Also referred to as ccTLDs or country-code specific top-level domains. These are representative of the specific countries they are targeted for, so .ca for Canada or .jp for Japan. This makes them a strong signaling property to both users and search engines that the content on your site is intended for users within that country.

Structuring Your URLs

So when it comes to structuring your URLs for localized content, you have a few options ranging from most ideal to least ideal:

Image Source: Google

Duplicate Content and Its Implications

Duplicate content is bad. This is simple to understand and relatively simple to avoid.

One specific scenario to watch out for is placing the same content on two different URLs, even if these URLs are targeted for the same local audience.

Having the same content on example.jp and example.com/jp/ will be treated as duplicate content and carry with it a negative SEO effect. If it is necessary that these pages both exist, make sure you take steps to not compete against yourself for organic rankings.

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